I’m a 25 year-old software developer living on the not-so-sunny island of Guernsey in the Channel Islands. I’m married to my better half, Amanda, and we have a baby son Noah (born August 2011).
I currently work for Digimap Ltd. where I don’t really touch anything to do with maps as we are a software house as well as the primary mapping provider for the Channel Islands. I also started a company called Reformsoft with a friend to further my interests and experience in software development outside of work.
I specialise in Ruby on Rails, ASP.NET MVC 3, SQL variants, jQuery, and UX. I hold a First Class Honours Degree (BSc Hons) in Computer Science from UoP. I studied for a few modules towards an MSc in Software Development with the Open University until my wife was near-about due to give birth.
Despite living the majority of my life on an island that’s only twenty-five miles square I’ve had my fair share of experience in my field. My passion in software development started off when I got a 486DX, and sitting at the command line I fired up Prince of Persia with excitement, an all time classic I had played years earlier on my Dad’s work computer. As time went on my passion for computers grew, and my cousin built me a system with a whopping 200MHz Intel CPU - I got to experience the realm of 3D. Time went by and my passion grew stronger and during my early years in college I found a new passion for software development. Of course it started out with some simple PHP scripts (before PHP had OO from what I recall), and playing around with C++.
Whilst studying ICT in college I decided to start a degree in Computer Science in my spare time, and once finishing college I decided to take the degree full-time at the University of Portsmouth. During my time at university I got to spend a year working for the IT giant Symantec as a Reproductions Engineer where I was assigned the task of locating bugs in Symantec’s Enterprise Vault. It was a daunting experience and I soon learned that companies like these not only employ the best of the best, but also just how varied the culture in the company was, and how well everyone got along. I graduated from university in 2008 with a First Class Honours Degree (BSc Hons) and won the Adam Crump memorial prize for personal achievement after surviving a life threatening illness.
Of course, this is only the start of the story. A degree gets you access to be a software developer and has no gauge on how good you are. The one thing I learned as soon as stepping in the industry is that your education means almost nothing - it’s the experience and insight you’ve gained from working with various technologies as well as the projects you’ve worked on that count to a potential employer. You could be known as the best coffee brewer in all of South America, but only if the consumer gets a taste of that coffee is your experience worth something.
The first company I joined was a market leading stock brokers in the Channel Islands as an “Information Systems Developer” (basically a software developer) where I got to work with the most talented SQL developers I have ever come into contact with, and I probably won’t ever meet SQL developers quite as good as them. It opened my eyes to how in-house software development worked, however I wanted to work in a different realm of software development where I can get deep into various technologies and frameworks.
After two years at my first company I decided to join Digimap Ltd where I’m a senior software developer. Whilst we have a great number of clients I primarily develop software for the government, typically large software systems. Our contracts vary from a few months up to a few years worth of work, so it’s very diverse. I’m responsible for the conception, development and deployment of the majority of projects I work on as well as enhancements and bug fixes.